Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Robin Lee Lovelace

  • A WILD REGION: Tales and Stories from the Heartland by Robin Lee Lovelace – Contemporary American Gothic, Short Story Collections, Weird Fiction

     

    A Wild Region: Tales and Stories from the Heartland by Robin Lee Lovelace is a wonderful collection of Weird fiction (emphasis on Weird), showcasing the oddities and fantastic adventures which hide among the everyday people of the midwestern United States.

    Lovelace opens with ‘Virgie’s Headless Chicken’, setting the tone for the full collection as Virgie attempts to reproduce a circus sideshow act. Lovelace shares her familial inspiration for this story in a fascinating preface.

    From there she gifts readers with the award-winning novella, Savonne, Not Vonny, a coming-of-age story of a little girl involving brothels, voodoo, and displaced gods. Savonne faces trial after trial as she grows up in different environments, all while she tries to understand her place in the world. This setting is particularly well-developed, leaving readers wanting more from even the secondary characters. Readers who loved Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will enjoy every page of Savonne’s adventures.

    Varying in emotion and impact, all of these tales will grab a reader’s attention. In every story of A Wild Region, fully-realized characters deal with important problems, approaching them with their own strange solutions.

    A Wild Region, as a whole, deals with themes of belonging. Some stories explore belonging to a family, be it blood or found. Others in relation to society. No matter how strange and fantastic the setting and circumstances, the characters drive each story. Even the most bizarre elements are secondary to the characters, enhancing their journey. Readers will feel for each protagonist, rooting for them to the end.

    This collection will help readers see their own surroundings with a new curiosity.

    Every one of these stories takes place in the mundane, real world, tucked away somewhere at the edges of daily life with ties to the South and Midwest United states. From a southern Indiana farmhouse in the 1940s on to an abandoned mansion in a virus-ravaged Memphis in 2041, readers will look twice at roadside attractions and dusty drives which lead into the unmitigated wilds of this continent, questioning their hidden mysteries.

    Lovelace is a strong voice in contemporary Weird and Southern Gothic fiction whom readers should continue to watch for. Hopefully, she has many more fantastic scenarios and characters yet to share with the world.

    Included in this collection, Uncle won the 2021 Marguerite McGlinn short story competition and Savonne, Not Vonny by Robin Lee Lovelace won Grand Prize in the 2020 CIBA Shorts Awards for Short Stories, Novellas, and Collections.

     

    5 Star Best Book Chanticleer Reviews round silver sticker

  • SAVONNE, NOT VONNY by Robin Lee Lovelace – Southern Literature, Myths & Legends, 1960’s

    Shorts Grand Prize for Short Stories, Novelettes, & Novellas Savonne, Not Vonny by Robin Lee LovelaceRobin Lee Lovelace evokes a world in which the mystical intertwines with the everyday in Savonne, Not Vonny, a coming-of-age story set in rural Louisiana.

    Nine-year-old Savonne lives in a small room at the back of Mama Gwen’s whorehouse, in Indianapolis in the ’60s. Her mama is one of the working girls, and her father is Mama Gwen’s own son. Savonne’s daddy dotes on her, and Mama Gwen loves Savonne like the daughter she never had; the two of them together make a loving home for Savonne, in the midst of their raucous brothel.

    By contrast, Savonne’s birth mother rarely pays her any mind. A “crazy-ass woman” with a temper “as hot as a Mississippi afternoon,” Coco is not at all opposed to beating the bejesus out of someone. In a fury one night, she does something that cannot be undone, and in her headlong flight out of town, she takes Savonne with her.

    And so it is that Savonne is forced from the only home she’s ever known and left in the care of her mysterious and reclusive great-grandfather, Pompey.

    With Pompey, Savonne enters another world, one of casual acquaintance with hoodoo and root work, a world where Papa Legba guards the crossroads and serves as an intermediary between the human and the spirit world, a world where an enemy might cast a subtle spell or command the serpents, or shapeshift into another form himself. However, as long as Pompey is there to guard her, Savonne is safe. She takes after her great-grandfather, and he recognizes that she too has the gift, the ability to conjure, “the natural.”

    But the day will come when Savonne is left to face the forces that would undo her, with only Leatha, Pompey’s old black dog all gone now to gray and stiff-boned, by her side. Before her journey home is over, Savonne must outwit an enemy far more powerful than she — and rely on help from the most unlikely of allies.

    Robin Lee Lovelace has conjured a world in which the seen and the unseen alike direct our days, in which the divine intermingles with the mundane, with characters so rich and fully realized they fairly leap off the page.

    Pick this story up for the delicious experience of diving headlong into a landscape reminiscent of those spun by the finest Southern writers in the American canon.

    Readers may find themselves racing through this novella to see how it all comes out for Savonne in the end, and likely wanting more of Savonne and her world (and maybe those allies too) in her full short story collection, A Wild Region, is available now!

    Savonne, Not Vonny by Robin Lee Lovelace won Grand Prize in the 2020 CIBA Shorts Awards for Short Stories.

     

    5 Stars! Best Book Chanticleer Book Reviews